Announcing Needle & Thread

November 14, 2016

Needle & Thread. For those who are familiar with my projects, Needle & Thread has been an easter egg that you might have seen at some point before now (like on our Transifex page). It has been like our own little Dharma Initiative— a shadowy organization with some secret meaning, but no obvious answers.

Tonight, not only am I going to tell you what it is, I’m also going to be outlining several major changes that it will bring for Vocal and Birdie. This is the first (and biggest) of a set of announcements and sneak peeks leading up to the release of Vocal 2.0 here in the next few weeks.

Having multiple, separate projects is difficult to keep up with. You end up with multiple social media accounts, multiple websites and blogs, multiple organizations on GitHub, and- well, you get the picture.

I’ve always dreamed of starting a little company making free and open source software. That’s what Needle & Thread is. It’s simply the parent organization that will house all my projects. I am in the process of filing paperwork to establish an LLC, so it will soon be small company in order to make the business aspects of my life simpler, but really it’s a way for me to keep my projects in one spot. It makes it easier for you, it makes it easier for me, and opens up a world of possibilities which I will talk more about in the coming weeks and months.

Without saying too much, here are some changes you can expect to see:

The Vocal Twitter and Google+ accounts will automatically become accounts for the LLC

Announcements for all of the projects will go through the Needle & Thread social media accounts, and will be posted on the company blog

The Birdie Twitter account will be more or less abandoned, with a pinned Tweet directing people to the Needle & Thread account

The vocalproject.net domain will redirect to the project page on the Needle & Thread site. We lost the birdieapp.eu domain a while ago due to a number of reasons, and I decided to not pursue getting it back because I anticipated the change. That domain is just gone and will not redirect, as it is entirely out of my control

All our GitHub repos will become a part of the new Needle & Thread organization.

I’m sure there’s a lot more that I’ve forgotten to mention, but that’s the gist. If you have any questions, please send them my way. I hope you are all as excited about this as I am. Lots of great new things are in store.